AML 3285

American Indian Literature

This course will acquaint students with some of the history of the American Indian experience and introduce them to literature created by American Indian authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider American Indian literature as a creative and collective interpretation of history and culture. We will also examine how contemporary literature addresses issues of concern to Indian people, including legal sovereignty, cultural survival, representations of Indians in non-native communities, and issues of environmental stewardship. Readings will consist mostly of novels, by authors including D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Tomson Highway, Le Anne Howe, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko. But we will also read works of criticism and historical material that will provide essential contexts and analysis for our literary reading.

AML 3605

African American Literature I

Description: African American writers from 1746 to the present have written in all genres, leaving none unchanged by the appropriation. It is a literature that not only intertextualizes elements of the vernacular tradition (spirituals, folktales and the blues) and its own immediate past, but is a regenerative force of conscious construction and literary beauty within the history of American literature. The goal of this course is to investigate the transformational power of black imagination and artistic genius. Students will gain an understanding of and appreciation for the creative dexterity and conventions of this literature. The period covered begins with Lucy Terry’s 1746 “Bars Fight” and ends with the Harlem Renaissance. Although chronology is obscured by a focus on genre, readings are arranged so that students can trace the development of various genres and various styles, themes, images, and structures across time and within individual author’s works. In this way, the course emphasizes the creative process, intertextuality, and literary history.

Format: Class sessions include lectures but are discussion based primarily. The three-hour block of class time, Mondays, represents three class sessions. Participation in discussion is an important part of your grade. You should listen carefully to others, ask questions of me and other students, and share your ideas. I expect all students to create an environment that encourages the participation of everyone. If you feel uncomfortable with discussion-based classes or feel you cannot contribute successfully, you should drop this course immediately.

AML 3607

African American Lit 2

This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by well-known artists as well as writers whose works have been overlooked for various reasons. Readings and film screenings will cover such playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, novelists as James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, James McBride, Toni Morrison, John A. Williams, poets as Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and filmmakers as Spike Lee and Marlon Riggs.

Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize contemporary social and psychological conflicts that occur when individuals and groups resist societal pressures to conform to hegemonic beliefs about race, sexuality, and gender. (To describe a hegemonic belief formation is not to say that a majority supports this belief system about race, sexuality, and gender, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this singular racialized-sexualized-gendered vision of society.)

Note: Assigned and recommended texts and readings are held at the Reserve Desk on the second floor of Library West. Check the Reserve List for this course to see if any assigned essays or plays are available as PDF files on ARES (ELECTRONIC RESERVE) section on the Smathers Library Website. Look under Reid and this course’s section number.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

1) Pop Quizzes on weekly readings as well as film(s) screened in the previous class [10 points](1pt–3pts each)

The importance of the material presented to the class. Students must make brief references to primary scenes in a particular literary work (or film) to illustrate important issues and support their argument.

The clarity of the written and oral work. Here, “clarity” refers to smooth oral delivery, correct use of descriptive terminology and grammar.

The student’s ability to pose important questions to the class at the end of their oral presentation. Students must introduce the argument/thesis of their oral presentation based on their assigned section.

3) Students are responsible for a typed 1-page outline of their 5-minute discussion. [10 points]

The outline is due on the day when the student presents her/his 5-minute discussion.

4) MIDTERM EXAM 60 MINS [20 points]

5) FINAL EXAM 120 MINS [40 points]

The Final Exam covers all assigned readings, in-class film screenings, class discussions, and the pop quizzes.

AML 3673

Eating, Food, and Asian America: Race, Culture, and Identity

Course Description: Food is necessary for life and hunger is a basic urge but eating and food are not simply about satisfying basic urges. Food is expressive. This course will bring food studies, psychoanalysis, and race studies to bear upon an understanding of Asian-American literary and cultural production. Anthropologists have long recognized that food is a metonym for culture and a way of expressing social identity. Food is also associated with power and control. For Asian Americans, as for other minorities food is often a marker of racial difference. Popular culture often promotes an exoticization of Asian Americans through food and ethnic restaurants in turn offer self-exoticization as a means of luring consumers: dragons abound in Chinese restaurants and geisha drinks in Japanese restaurants. In psychoanalysis images of consumption have related ideas of self to the Other: to consume the food of the Other might signify cultural assimilation and cultural cannibalism. At the same time cooking often means necessity: for Asian-American immigrants restaurants and grocery stores have often been the easiest means of earning a livelihood. This course brings together the cultural and political economies of foodways to examine Asian American literary and cultural production. We will examine works from a variety of Asian American genres including autobiographies, short stories, poems, memoirs, novels, and music videos.

AML 4453

Animals in American Literature and Culture

Melissa Bianchi

This is an interdisciplinary, discussion-based course that explores animals and human animality in American fiction, culture, and philosophy. Americans have and continue to use animals in a variety of ways—as companions, food, commodities, metaphors, spectacles, entertainment, projections of the self, etc. The course examines how relationships between humans and other animals have been conceived and challenged in American works. Some questions the course will explore include:

How do animals and human animality in American works intersect with historical constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and class?

What do animals and animalized humans in the course texts reveal about American identities, biopolitics, and ethics?

How do American conceptions of animals (or “the animal”) circulate in and influence conversations about economies, exploitation, disability, the Anthropocene, and the post- and non-human turns?

By answering these and related queries, we might turn our attentions to the human-animal divide and consider alternative conceptions of being and ways that humans might engage with other animals. In addition to introducing students to the emerging field of animal studies and its applications in American literature, this course helps students to develop their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through class assignments and service-learning.

AML 4685

Women Writing about Race: “The Trouble between Us”

Description: This course surveys women’s writing during the late 20th Century to the present, focusing on gendered Black and White race relations as presented in their literature and in American culture critiques. Students will trace, analyze and discuss how Black and White women talk about each other, coop and reject each other, or, simply, ignore each other in literature as they and their characters negotiate gendered social, political, and personal challenges.

Goals: To discover how change and racial relations are developed both in our culture and in the way writers and their readers respond to those changes and situations. Students will discuss how Black and White women, as represented in literature (and film adaptations), move through and solve challenging racial situations and bonding opportunities.

Format: The readings and teaching methods of this course are eclectic in pursuit of a variety of texts and experiences. The class sessions include lectures, discussions, and student reports. Our discussions will focus on novels, short stories, poetry, essays, videos and films. As investigators and scholars, our inquiries will play in the spaces between practice, method, and theory in order to address the commonalties, disruptions, gaps, absences, and silences that exist among the primary texts.

CRW 3110

Imaginative Writing: The Short Story

What is a short story? No genre has so consistently eluded definition. Stories can range from eighty pages (Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”) to a single sentence (Amy Hempel’s “Housewife”). The purpose of this workshop will be to explore the parameters of this seductive and evasive form, from the standpoint both of the practitioner and the reader.

The class will be built around the idea that writers learn by reading. Therefore you may find the reading load heavier than is typical for a fiction workshop. Each week you will be asked to read a selection of stories by an established writer, and to arrive in class prepared to discuss them cogently. This conversation will take up roughly a third of our allotted time; the other two-thirds will be devoted to discussion of your own work and occasional in-class exercises.

The requirement of the class, in terms of writing, is that you complete two stories, the first by midterm and the second by term’s end. (The second may be an outgrowth of the first.) It goes without saying that attendance is mandatory, and that failure to show up (along with failure to do the reading) will have an adverse effect on your final grade. Grading will be based on your informed participation in the seminar, the critical acuity you show when judging other students’ writing, and your willingness to work hard.

CRW 3110

Imaginative Writing: Fiction

This workshop course, the penultimate in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing, seeks to help you write fiction better than you might already. Time is spent also on correct usage. We also seek to have you read better: to read for form, recognizing strength and weakness in your own and in others’ writing, and recognizing various technical maneuvers in the published work we will read.

Students write three pieces of fiction, delivering a copy to each class member one week prior to group criticism. Students participate in that group criticism with wit and cogency and pertinence and deliver a letter of good criticism for each story read. This criticism has one object: to improve the work.

Assigned readings, from a book or two by a major writer, will also be discussed. This reading will be looked at usually in a somewhat technical manner; it is hoped that in the best of all possible worlds the reading will inspire a mimicry of correct form as you make the long trek unto your own vision and your own good writing.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

This is the intermediate poetry workshop for undergraduates. Successful applicants will have absolved two or more workshops, and be thoroughly conversant with workshop practice and etiquette (make copies of your poems; come to class with prepared comments on each other’s work; keep silence while being discussed). In addition to the workshop component, we will read work by Joseph Brodsky (A Part of Speech), Karen Solie (The Road in is not the Same Road Out), and Derek Walcott (Midsummer).

CRW 4905

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

This workshop is intended for students who are serious about writing fiction and (or) who are contemplating attending MFA programs in creative writing. It is assumed that most students will already have fiction projects underway or in mind, though this is not a requirement. The reading may include stories by Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, and Denis Johnson.